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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26858170">Like a Flashback in a Film Reel</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorediloto/pseuds/fiorediloto'>fiorediloto</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Band of Brothers (TV 2001)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, Siblings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 17:35:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,770</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26858170</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiorediloto/pseuds/fiorediloto</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>He must be crazy; someone must tell him. It was out of courtesy, really. Or maybe she was just bored, lonely, tipsy. Whatever it was, she flexed her best Lewis Nixon muscles like a boxer before the punch and said: “You know he’s damaged goods, right?”</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>79</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Like a Flashback in a Film Reel</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for the LLSS prompt: "This Is Me Trying" by Taylor Swift.</p><p>Beta'd by fandom treasure Tec, thank you dear!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> 1951 </em>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>“He’s gone.”</p><p>Lew wavers on Blanche’s porch like one of those flimsy young trees that the slightest gush of wind can slap whichever way. Given that there’s a storm raging outside, the metaphor might not be too off the mark.</p><p>“Oh,” Blanche breathes and says nothing. And not because she’s out of things to say, but because Lewis’s tense, dejected expression froze all the words right on the tip of her tongue. She considers keeping up some kind of pretense, playing dumb—asking “Who?”—but Lewis looks like an animal ready to bolt and in twenty-eight years on God’s green earth she’s never once seen that painful mix of incredulity and desperation on his face.</p><p>Lew swallows around what appears to be a difficult lump in his throat. The rain stained his tan-colored trousers and the camel fedora which appeared on his head one day a year ago—a gift: pretty, but not his usual style—and it’s now stabbing his back on the tiny porch in front of Blanche’s flat. He doesn’t seem to care.</p><p>Blanche wraps the lapels of her dressing gown tighter around her body and crosses her arms. Seeing him like this she feels suddenly angry, and anger melts down all the words that were frozen on her tongue. “Are you going to stand there like a beggar? Come inside.”</p><p>“Can’t. I just wanted to—You haven’t seen him, have you?” Lew asks in a flat tone, already far away with his mind; not even a real question.</p><p>“You think he’s sitting in my boudoir painting his nails?”</p><p>Lew shakes his head; he doesn’t react to Blanche’s jab, not even with an eye roll, which downright alarms her. “Right. I’ll go then.”</p><p>“Go <em> where</em>?” Blanche asks. Lew’s car is parked in front of the building, one front wheel on the curb, the driver’s door left open in what Blanche imagines was a hell of a hurry. Like he'd actually believed that he would find him here, and he ran out of the car as if chased by demons, only to suddenly find himself standing in front of Blanche’s door and realize how absurd that was.</p><p>“Lancaster,” Lew answers, like it’s obvious, and starts turning on his heels. His body looks clunky, poorly coordinated, like each muscle has a mind and an opinion of its own. Blanche reaches out to touch his arm, and a few raindrops wet her lace sleeve.</p><p>“You’re drunk,” she says. “Come inside.”</p><p>“I’m not drunk.” Blanche notices for the first time the film of perspiration on his face. Lew looks around himself like there might be a whole audience listening in to their conversation, but there’s nobody out there. Blanche’s feet are getting wet in her slippers.</p><p>“Lew,” she insists, wrapping her fingers more firmly around his arm, “you’re not driving two hours in this weather to give that poor lady a fright.”</p><p>“I’m not an idiot. I won’t tell her,” Lew replies.</p><p>“Tell her <em> what</em>?” Blanche asks pointedly, drawing him one step closer to the door.</p><p>Lew first looks at her incredulously, then lets out the bitter, raspy chuckle that only comes to him late into a drinking session, when glass after glass of whiskey has carved a burning path at the back of his throat.</p><p>“Jesus, are we still doing this? Pretending like you don't know?” </p><p>“For God's sake, Lew,” Blanche snorts, drawn into swearing by his swearing, and instantly annoyed at herself for the slip. She succeeds in pulling Lewis halfway into the doorstep. “If you really want to scare Dick’s mom half to death, we can phone her. Now come inside.”</p><p>“All right, I—” Lew lets himself be guided inside, and the door has already clicked shut when he raises his head and objects, “No, goddamnit, I don’t have their number,” but at this point he’s become pliant in Blanche’s grip and she can drag him a few steps deeper into the apartment.</p><p>“I’ll make coffee. God, you smell awful,” she says conspicuously loud, but Lew isn’t paying attention. She manages to drag him through the entrance and all the way into her dark living room. On the settee, he lands heavily on a warm blanket that lies bunched up on the cushions, leans his head backward against the backrest, and stops moving altogether.</p><p>She disappears into the kitchen. She puts the coffee pot on the fire, moving fast in the familiar darkness, anxious that the distraught man on her settee will just get up in a burst of energy and flee the scene, headed off to catch his death on a wet stretch of road. But as the coffee boils, she goes back to find him exactly where she’s left him.</p><p>His eyes are closed, but he’s not sleeping. The fingers of his right hand are twitching, too regularly for it to be a reflex. They bend in turns, one after another, fast, from thumb to pinkie. Counting.</p><p>“Coffee’s on,” she announces, stopping on the doorway. She’s whispering, who knows why. </p><p>Lew doesn’t answer, doesn’t open his eyes nor turn his head towards her, but his fingers stop moving.</p><p>“Lewis?”</p><p>“Do you know how long we’ve known each other?” Lew asks, as if he hadn’t heard her at all. </p><p>Blanche shakes his head. “I don’t know. Seven, eight years?”</p><p>“Nine,” Lew corrects. “Nine years, six months, and—and—” He falters; he draws his hands up to his face and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, hard, so hard he must be seeing stars and flashes under his lids. “Some. Can’t count. Fuck.”</p><p>Blanche feels something akin to pity grip her throat. “What happened?” she asks, even though she knows what happened, even though what happened is what always happens: they are charmed, they fall in love, they last as long as they can, then the back and forth starts and drags on as they try to patch up a fabric so stretched that it’s bursting at the seams, and eventually they leave. Kathy did; the ones before her did too.</p><p>To his credit, <em>he</em> lasted longer than most. Long enough that even Blanche thought— That she almost believed—</p><p>“Milk,” Lew answers in a hoarse whisper. “We were out of milk.”</p><p>“You were out of milk,” Blanche repeats, and Lew nods slowly, deeply, like he can barely force his head to rise up once his chin has touched his chest.</p><p>“So I went. To buy milk. And I saw—I stopped for a moment. I remembered we were out of—of something else. One thing led to another. You know.” He speaks in slow staccato sentences, like a machine if machines could sound like they’d had a life and it had been sucked out of their body. “I was late. I don’t know where the milk is.”</p><p>Blanche represses a sigh. He came home smelling like he did now, didn’t he, one or two or nine glasses under his belt.  She can figure out the rest.</p><p>“Is there an open store in this fucking neighborhood?” he asks, half rising up, but then all energy abandons him and he falls back into the cushions like a doll. “He'll bust my ass if he comes back and there's no milk.”</p><p>“I’ve got milk,” she says. She throws a quick look behind her, into the kitchen from which she can already smell coffee. “I’ll go pour the coffee, okay?” He doesn’t acknowledge what she’s said. “Lew? I’ll be back.”</p><p>His grunt is as good an answer as she’s going to get right now, so she takes it as such.</p><p>Blanche wraps her arms around her chest and heads to the kitchen. The fire’s off; the coffee is exhaling its last bubbly vapors. She looks up and sighs, openly this time.</p><p>“He’s all right,” she says, to prevent a question.</p><p>Dick’s standing in the corner, a tall shadow in a crumpled sweater and a pair of velvet trousers, his arms hanging stiffly along his sides. She can’t see his face clearly, but if she could, she knows what she would find: a tense mouth, cheekbones, early crow’s feet around his eyes. When he speaks, his voice is a defeated rumble.</p><p>“Did you call him?”</p><p>She opens the cupboard, grabs a coffee mug and sets it on the kitchen counter. She didn’t; she’s smart enough not to push herself even deeper into Lewis’s marital storms, not when she knows neither man wants her involved even as they come running for help to her doorstep.</p><p>For God’s sake, is this her life now? Playing second fiddle to her brother’s shipwrecked romances?</p><p>When did this start, she wonders, when did she become their last resort, her home the place where they come bringing their problems? It’s not like she’s ever been good at solving anyone’s problems; certainly not her own.</p><p>“I said I wouldn’t, didn’t I,” she replies, perhaps a little too tersely, but she quashes the incipient regret right away.</p><p>“You did. I’m sorry,” Dick acknowledges. “I didn’t think he’d come here.”</p><p>Blanche pours the coffee, and as she does, she parses Dick’s last comment. He’s right to think that; they’re not that close, the Nixon siblings, little more than acquaintances but certainly not friends. They love each other, she thinks, in a visceral, primitive way they routinely stifle with sarcasm and a studied distance, but they don’t <em>like</em> each other all that much. To be honest, there isn’t all that much to like.</p><p>“I knew he would,” she says, because it’s true, because that’s what Lew does when he has nowhere else to turn. “Eventually.”</p><p>She realizes that she’s taken that tone from Lewis, that spiteful way he has of delivering lines like people are supposed to be impressed. It worked on her when she was young; she would employ the same tone with her father, or her friends, and it wouldn’t win her any sympathies but it would make her feel good. Superior. Dick doesn’t deserve it; the man already gets his daily ration from Lewis, and let’s face it, no one deserves a double ration.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” Dick repeats, and the humiliation in his voice is almost too much to bear. This proud man that Lewis has dragged onto his knees. She likes him; he’s stubborn but kind, and he tries. He really does. It’s not his fault that Lewis is beyond salvation; Dick just failed where everyone else before him has failed. </p><p>She used to picture Dick as Bluebeard’s wife, wandering around the house carefree, unaware of the locked door full of the massacred bodies of her husband’s past loves. She told him once, at their house in Nixon, after a glass too many. It runs in the family, and while Lewis scoured their basement for a bottle of Goering’s vintage, Blanche leaned back in her armchair and studied this man from head to toe, really studied him, and the more she studied him the more she realized that she didn’t understand what she was seeing: a decent, hard-working, patient man with enough smarts and self-esteem to know that the only thing to do was get on the highway and never come back—and yet, against all odds and common sense, here he was.</p><p>He must be crazy; someone must tell him. It was out of courtesy, really. Or maybe she was just bored, lonely, tipsy. Whatever it was, she flexed her best Lewis Nixon muscles like a boxer before the punch and said: “You know he’s damaged goods, right?”</p><p>As the words were out, she knew she’d crossed a line. She expected to be politely told to fuck off, and quickly sharpened a brazen response in her mind.</p><p>Dick studied her back for a long moment, and simply said: “I know.”</p><p>“Nothing to be sorry about,” she says now, more kindly, as she turns around to face him. For a moment they stand in front of one another just like that, the hot mug hovering between them, both unsure what the next step is and who’s going to take it.</p><p>“I'll get him on his feet and drive us home,” Dick finally says, to break the impasse. “We've bothered you enough.”</p><p>She shakes her head. “Not in this weather, you aren't,” she objects. As if on cue, the wind howls frightfully outside, and the tree in front of Blanche’s window bends and snaps in a whiplash movement. </p><p>Dick nods in resignation. He looks out of the window and heaves an uncertain sigh; it trembles in his throat almost like a sob. “I didn’t think that he’d take the car. He could’ve—”</p><p>“He didn’t,” Blanche replies, stopping the film reel that has started spinning in Dick’s mind, and in hers. “He’s fine, Dick. Worst that can happen, he’ll be sick on my rug.”</p><p>She takes a step forward, places her hand on his arm and squeezes softly.</p><p>He's so strong still, so solid. Handsome too, sure. The first time they met, right after the war, she thought of stealing him. For fun, mostly; to spite Lew. To punish him for never writing. She had no interest in keeping him. But in the end she didn't even try, telling herself that the prize was not worth Lewis's endless sulking. Who was she fooling? She never stood a chance.</p><p>Dick looks at her hand, then at her face, and slowly, gently, twists his arm away to reach out and take the mug. His fingers are cold and rough-skinned but gentle around hers. He then stares into the depths of it as if there was some revelation to be found if he looks just hard enough.</p><p>“He hates coffee when he's drunk,” he observes.</p><p>She takes a step back and clucks her tongue impatiently. “Well, he shouldn't be rewarded for it, should he?”</p><p>“It wasn’t his fault.”</p><p>Blanche sighs. At this rate he's going to last another couple of months, maybe half a year. If they're lucky, Lewis will have landed on a rebound before Dick packs his bags. It's a cruel thought, but it would make things easier for everybody.</p><p>“Dick, dear. You’re smarter than that.”</p><p>“This time,” he adds. “It wasn’t his fault <em>this time</em>.”</p><p>That rings strange, and it gives her pause. “What?” she asks, suddenly wondering if she shouldn’t have asked hours ago, when Dick showed up on her doorstep on foot, half-soaked and looking like he’d seen a ghost. But she’d assumed, and he’d let her assume.</p><p>Dick wraps both his hands around the mug and takes a breath. “I’ve been recalled to active duty. Got the letter a week ago.”</p><p>Blanche blinks, once, twice, and says something that sounds stupid to her own ears: “They can’t do that.”</p><p>To her surprise, Dick lets out a chuckle under his breath. “That’s what he said.”</p><p>“I mean it. There must be something we can—” Her voice falters and fades to silence. Dick's look is polite but it says what he thinks: that she's just a woman, and there's nothing, nothing she can do. </p><p>Maybe he's right.</p><p>She turns her head to the sitting room, to the sleeping lump on her settee. “Will you be okay on the sofa? The two of you?”</p><p>Dick nods and straightens his shoulders. “Yeah. I'll deal with it,” he promises, though it sounds like he's promising more than he can keep, and he knows.</p><p>In the sitting room, Lewis has curled up on the sofa like a sleeping dog, his face pressed into Dick's borrowed blanket. Dick kneels down in front of him and shakes him softly.</p><p>“Uh? Hey,” Lew murmurs sleepily, reaching out to wrap his lax fingers around the back of Dick's neck. “You came home.”</p><p>“We're at your sister's place,” Dick explains. “She made you coffee.”</p><p>Blanche lingers in the doorway for a moment, little more than a dark shadow lit up by the occasional lightning bolt, and then heads off to her room.</p><p>“Dick,” Lew chokes, “I'm sorry, I fucked up.”</p><p>“No,” Dick's voice follows, strong and sure like nothing's wrong in the world. “No. Everything's all right.”</p><p>As she makes her way to her room, she thinks of her mother, of her war bond selling parties, her meetings, the carousel of Army and Navy and ANRC officials who gyrated around her like moths around a fire. After the drapes and the flowers, Blanche would be her favorite decoration, a lovely centerpiece who could laugh at jokes and impress with her pretty silences. Some of these men would make polite advances, never accepted, never turned down.</p><p>She thinks.</p><p>Maybe Dick's right, and there's absolutely nothing she can do.</p><p>Or maybe, she can call in a favor.</p>
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